While I have never needed to administrate 100 bbpress installs I have had the need to administrate 3 and it was a pain having to keep each one up to date with plugins etc.
I’m not sure what exactly OP means when he says “administrate”, but if all that is required is the ability to run multiple forums from one set of core/plugins/templates the solution I came up with was to hack the wordpress virtual multiblog plugin to work with bbpress. It was fairly easy as bbpress and wordpress cores are quite similar.
each forum has its own database and VMB simply loads a different config file for each forum.
I was having the same problem. I back tracked through the code and found the problem was the admin section looking for a secure cookie and the login script was always setting the cookies without the secure flag. I worked around the issue by changing the force_ssl_admin function to always return true.
function is located in: bbpress/bb-includes/backpress/functions.core.php line 802-ish
hope this helps somebody.
